Monster Essays

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY TO OUR EXPLORATION OF MONSTROSITYExplanation of Color Scheme/Spatial Metaphors of SiteGlossary of Terms

The Oxford English Dictionary lists five definitions for monster: 1. Something extraordinary or unnatural; a prodigy, a marvel. 2. An animal or plant deviating in one or more of its parts from the normal type; spec., an animal afflicted with some congenital malformation; a misshapen birth, an abortion. 3. An imaginary animal (such as the centaur, sphinx, minotaur, or the heraldic griffin, wyvern, etc.) having a form either partly brute and partly human, or compounded of elements from two or more animal forms. 4. A person of inhuman and horrible cruelty or wickedness; a monstrous example of (wickedness, or some particular vice). 5. An animal of huge size; hence, anything of vast and unwieldy proportions.

The word 'monster' in America today can mean all of these things, though in the common vernacular it is generally used as 3 and 5 above: 'Monsters' are creatures we become on Halloween; we drive 'monster' trucks and look for jobs on 'Monster.com.' 'Monster' implies largeness, a quality almost universally admired in American culture. But what does the existence of monsters (as 'imaginary' animals) in a culture signify?

A culture's monsters emblematically embody its most acute anxieties. Cultures create and ascribe meaning to monsters, endowing them with characteristics derived from their most deep-seated fears and taboos. The body of the monster, then, becomes the site of these cultural proscriptions, representing the taboos of the societies that spawn them: "the monster's body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy . . . , giving them life and an uncanny independence" (Cohen 4). A monster cannot be contained. A monster disobeys its master, overspills its margins, consumes its benefactors. We make scapegoats of our monsters, attributing to them our own misdeeds and faults while using them as vehicles for intergenerational transfers of taboos and morals.

The monster becomes a way of explaining the seemingly inexplicable. The humanoid form most monsters assume is our own--familiar yet unfamiliar--and transgressions performed by the monster reinforce its status as 'other:' "In its function as dialectical Other or third-term supplement, the monster is an incorporation of the Outside, the Beyond--of all those loci that are rhetorically placed as distant but originate Within" (Cohen 7). A monster dwells on the fringes of what is culturally acceptable (Grendel). Banished to the physical and social hinterlands, he is also border guard (Sasquatch). Whoever crosses into the monster's realm has also transgressed, broken the taboo, courted contamination. The transgressor must then encounter the monster on its own terms.

In Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud writes that taboo, originally a Polynesian word, means something that is simultaneously sacred and profane (821). Taboo does not solicit silence nor encourage ignorance, but demands rather an awareness and deliberate avoidance of the sacred/profane object or action. Taboo is characterized by a "dread of physical contact . . . . [and a conviction] that violation will be followed by unbearable disaster," which is not necessarily "external" or physical (828). The violator of a taboo likewise becomes taboo and must be avoided. Freud writes that the transgressor "has the dangerous property of tempting others to follow his example . . . . He is therefore really contagious [emphasis mine], in so far as every example incites to imitation and, therefore, he himself must be avoided" (832).

Acknowledging that any system of categorization is somewhat arbitrary, subject as it must be to the caprices and whims of its creators, we propose four categorical rubrics of origination for our discussion of monstrosity, with the premise that each monster symbolizes one or more cultural taboos: Reanimated Monsters (once-dead monsters revived); Ecological Monsters (monsters with environmental origins); Human Monsters (genetic freaks and psychotics); and Technological Monsters (monsters coming into being through the (mis)application of technical knowledge). Such a taxonomy allows for the cross categorization of monsters with multiple narratives of origin (thus the vampire might be viewed as both a human and a reanimated monster). A table of taboos and monsters is included within this site, encouraging comparisons and debates about the meanings of the monsters and their relations to one another. Furthermore, each over- view contains a "Monster Blender" which visually depicts the melding of related creatures, reinforcing the similarities of the monsters and ourselves. Perhaps the horror derived from cinematic and literary monsters stems from the latent monstrosity that lurks within each and everyone of us.

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